You Can’t Read That! is a periodic post featuring banned book reviews and news roundups.
Something tells me I’ll have plenty of material for this column over the next four years. The Cattle Car Caucus is in power, and the Thought Police will be feeling their oats. Let the book burnings begin!
YCRT! News
What does “pervasively vulgar” mean? If you’re a school superintendent inclined to cave to parental complaints, it’s a handy label to apply to books and graphic novels you’re removing from school reading lists and libraries.
“Imagine for a moment how the world would be different if Star Trek had never aired on the grounds that the mixed-race, mixed-gender bridge was against ‘natural law,’ so the FCC forbade it.” From a discussion about censorship, comics and graphic novels, and the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund.
Take the Banned Book Quiz! I got a perfect score!
Is it any surprise that in the face of repeated parental challenges to books and teaching materials, school administrators, teachers, and librarians preemptively self-censor?
Dateline Blountville, Tennessee: angry mom demands school district stop using history book that mentions Islam.
There is something very disturbing about this report from Kansas City, Missouri, describing how a librarian was arrested and is now facing criminal charges for standing up for a library patron’s free speech rights at a public event.
In the 1930s, the Nazi government had an agent in Hollywood. That agent persuaded Universal Pictures to shelve, at least for a time, three films: “The Road Back,” “All Quiet on the Western Front,” and “Three Comrades.”
I’m a little late to this party: racist internet trolls have been using code words to avoid having their accounts shut down: Google=black person, Skittle=Muslim, Skype-Jew, and so on. Hey, I’ll add one of my own: alt-right=racist! It’s like the secret menu at In-N-Out Burger!
Key sentence from this outraged conservative editorial about PC culture at Cal State University Chico: “True the N-word is nasty and unacceptable, but is Chico State going to ban students from listening to Hip-Hop music that makes prolific use of the word ‘nigger’ in songs?” In other words (stop me if you’ve heard this before): “Waaah, they get to use the N-word and we don’t! Its so unfair!”
Here’s one dad’s brilliant response to the cognitive dissonance created when his son’s teacher demanded a permission slip before allowing him to read Bradbury’s “Fahrenheit 451.”
The Lifeway religious bookstore chain has pulled all books by a Christian author who describes LGBT couples as “our brothers and sisters in Christ.”